Where to Hack or Stack Education?

Great post on Venture Beat by Paul Edelman who, “came up with a hack for curriculum development called TeachersPayTeachers where hundreds of thousands of teachers are circumventing the educational publishers and buying/selling/sharing their original content with each other.”

Paul riffs on Fred Wilson’s 2008 post Hacking Education, “in which he expressed frustration with our current educational institutions and called for replacing them with a grand hack, an internet-enabled “peer production, collaboration, social networking, web video, voip, open source, even game play” platform.”

For instance, you can’t hack the social nature of schooling and the necessary role it plays in identity trial and error or the learning that comes from the joy and despair of it all. Socialization is cognitively demanding. It only really works in-person among dynamic groups of fleshy rather than digital people. Conclusion? Stack it for most by keeping kids in schools. Hack it for social misfits, savants, autodidacts and for kids who live somewhere where there is no reasonable school to go to.